three-text: a 3D font rendering and text layout library for the web

jeremy tribby

Hi all,

I wanted to share a tool I just published that might be of interest to this community. it's a web based 3D font renderer built for three.js (although it may expand to other/no frameworks) and works with regular OTF, TTF, and WOFF fonts (WOFF2 not supported sadly). basically 3D text on the web with real fonts, opentype features, and linebreaking. you can take a look at the demo here, and drop your own fonts in (they stay local and are not uploaded) which has a few animation modes to give some idea of what you can do on the web with 3D text, but there are so many things I would never think of.. the demo is just a demo, ultimately, and I wonder how other people might use the underlying software library. you can check out the code on GitHub or install it from npm. it should support most scripts thanks to harfbuzzjs

I had my own use case in mind for this library, and I tried my best to generalize the API for anticipated ways of using it, but I'm very open to feedback, and have basically said in the repository that I expect the API to be unstable for a period. if you fit the "creative technologist" profile or know anyone who does (especially if they know about three.js), or have worked with any studios who you get the impression would be in interested in this tool but maybe they just haven't had it in their toolkit, please let them know about it! I don't know if it will catch on, but, yeah, I truly wonder how people might wield this thing

let me know if anyone has feature requests or bug reports! can always make an issue in the GitHub repo too  

Ermin Međedović

This is awesome Jeremy!

Roel Nieskens

This is awesome! When the dust settles around the API, will you include export functionality? Would be cool to build an animation and have an easy way to include this in other projects.

jeremy tribby

thanks ermin and roel! I wouldn't mind having export myself, I'll look into some of the possibilities there when I have a moment - maybe I'll open an issue in the morning so I don't forget. but yes there may be some dust to settle first 😅 

SCarewe

This looks amazing! It reminds me of some of the type tools published by DIA/MNKY Type: https://tools.dia.tv/

Maybe you know of these already? I'm not too familiar with any of these tools, but I just wanted to leave them here as reference.

Yves Michel

This is wonderful ! It would be interesting to animate variable fonts on their own different axes.
Bravo!